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David Malouf
| birth_place = Brisbane, Queensland, Australia | death_date = | death_place = | occupation = novelist, short story writer, playwright | nationality = Australian | genre = Novel, short story, poetry, theatre, opera libretto | movement = | influences = | influenced = | website = }} David George Joseph Malouf (born 20 March 1934) is an Australian poet and novelist. Life Malouf was born in Brisbane, Queensland, to a Christian Lebanese father and an English-born mother of Portuguese Sephardi Jewish descent. He was an avid reader as a child, and at 12 years old was reading such books as Wuthering Heights, Bleak House and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.Gilling, Tom, "David Malouf: Writer", The Weekend Australian Magazine, 2–3 August 2008, p. 28 These books, he says, taught him about sex: "They told you there was a life out there that was amazingly passionate". He attended Brisbane Grammar School and graduated from the University of Queensland in 1955. He lectured for a short period before moving to London, where he taught at Holland Park School before relocating to Birkenhead in 1962.http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth66 He returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney, taught at his old school, and lectured in English at the Universities of Queensland and Sydney. He has lived in England and Tuscany; for the past three decades, most of his time has been spent in Sydney. Like many writers, he values his privacy and enjoyed living in Tuscany "where he could think and write in anonymity". He is openly gay and has one sister, Jill Phillips. Career His first novel, Johnno (1975), is the semi-autobiographical tale of a young man growing up in Brisbane during World War II.David Malouf Overview It was adapted for the stage by La Boite Theatre in 2004. In 1982, his novella about three acquaintances and their experience of World War I, Fly Away Peter, won The Age Book of the Year fiction prize. His epic novel The Great World (1990) tells the story of two Australians and their relationship amid the turmoil of two World Wars, including imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II; the novel won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the French Prix Femina Étranger.David Malouf Overview His Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Remembering Babylon (1993) is set in northern Australia during the 1850s amid a community of Scottish immigrant farmers whose isolated existence is threatened by the arrival of a stranger, a young white man raised from boyhood by Indigenous Australians. It also won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book), and in 1996, it won the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Australian critic Peter Craven called Malouf'ss collection of short stories, Every Move You Make, "as formidable and bewitching a collection of stories as you would be likely to find anywhere in the English-speaking world". He goes on to say that "No one else in this country has: the maintenance of tone, the expertness of prose, the easeful transition between lyrical and realist effects. The man is a master, a superb writer, and also (which is not the same thing) a completely sophisticated literary gent". Malouf has written several volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a play, Blood Relations (1988). He has written libretti for three operas (including Voss, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Patrick White and first produced in the 1986 Adelaide Festival of Arts conducted by Stuart Challender), and Baa Baa Black Sheep (with music by Michael Berkeley), which combines a semi-autobiographical story by Rudyard Kipling with Kipling's Jungle Books.Australian Authors - David Malouf His memoirs, 12 Edmondstone Street, were published in 1985.David Malouf Overview Writing Malouf's writing is characterised by a heightened sense of spatial relations, from the physical environments into which he takes his readers—whether within or outside built spaces, or in a natural landscape. He has likened each of his succession of novels to the discovery and exploration of a new room in a house, rather than part of an overarching development. "At a certain point, you begin to see what the connections are between things, and you begin to know what space it is you are exploring."[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjSUpPv2rHw&feature=related The Wordshed – David Malouf, in the House of Writing, Part 1], YouTube video, accessed 30 August 2009 From his first book Johnno, his themes have focused on "male identity and soul-searching". He said that much of the male writing that preceded him "was about the world of action. I don't think that was ever an accurate description of men's lives". He believes that it was Patrick White who turned this around in Australian writing—that White's writing was the kind "that goes behind inarticulacy and or unwillingness to speak, writing that gives the language of feeling to people who don't have it themselves". He said that "I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives". However, after nearly four decades of writing, he has concluded that in older writers there's sometimes "a fading of the intensity of the imagination, and ... of the interest in the tiny details of life and behaviour—you see writers getting a bit impatient with that."[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HRzNHiklvA&feature=related The Wordshed – David Malouf, in the House of Writing, Part 4], YouTube video, accessed 30 August 2009 Malouf says of being a writer: "I totally reject the idea of being representative in any way. This whole idea of role models. It's a terrible idea. I don't like the idea of being some kind of representative consciousness of the country. You do what you do, the way you do it, out of a kind of necessity. I can't see how that would be useful to anyone else". Recognition Malouf was made an Officer in the Order of Australia in 1987, and elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989. In 1997 he was declared an Australian National Living Treasure.David Malouf (1934– ), Australian Poetry Library, Web, Mar. 13, 2012. Malouf was awarded the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing in 1988. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.Australian Authors - David Malouf In 2007, his short-story collection Every Move You Make won The Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction and the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Australian Short Story Collection - Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award.David Malouf Overview In 2008, Malouf won the Australian Publishers Association's Lloyd O'Neil Award for outstanding service to the Australian book industry"Brooks wins Book of the Year award", Sydney Morning Herald]], 15 June 2008 He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. Publications Poetry * Four Poets (by David Malouf, Don Maynard, Judith Green, & Rodney Hall). Melbourne: Cheshire, 1962. * Bicycle, and other poems. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1970. * Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1974. * Gesture of a Hand. Artarmon, NSW: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. * Poems 1975-1976. Sydney: Prism, 1976. * The Year of the Foxes, and other poems. New York: Braziller, 1979. * Wild Lemons: Poems. Sydney & London: Angus & Robertson, 1980. * First Things Last: Poems. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1980. * Selected Poems. North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Roberston, 1981. * Selected Poems. North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1991. * Poems 1959-1989. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1992. **published in UK as Selected Poems 1959-1989. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. * Typewriter Music. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2007. * Guide to the Perplexed and other poems. Warners Bay, NSW: Picaro Press, 2007. * Revolving Days: selected poems. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2008. Play * Blood Relations. Sydney: Currency Press, 1988. Opera libretti * Voss: An opera in one act (with music by Richard Meale). Pymble, NSW: Playbill, 1986. * Mer de Glace: An opera in two acts (with music by Richard Meale). Sydney: Australian Opera, 1991. * Baa Baa Black Sheep: A jungle tale (with music by Michael Berkeley). London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. * Jane Eyre (with music by Michael Berkeley). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000. Novels * Johnno: A novel. St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1975; New York: Braziller, 1975. * An Imaginary Life: A novel. Woolahra, NSW: Picador Pan, 1978; London: Chatto & Windus, 1978; New York: Braziller, 1978. * Fly Away Peter. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 1992; London: Chatto & Windus, 1982. * Harland's Half Acre. London: Chatto & Winus, 1984; New York: Knopf, 1984. * The Great World: A novel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989; New York: Pantheon, 1990. * Remembering Babylon. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992; Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 1993; New York: Pantheon, 1993; Toronto: Knopf, 1993. * The Conversations At Curlow Creek. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996; New York: Pantheon, 1996; Toronto: Knopf, 1996. * Ransom. North Sydney, NSW: Knopf, 2009; London: Chatto & Winus, 2009; New York: Knopf, 2009. *''Earth Hour''. St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2014. Short fiction *''Child's Play / The Bread of Time to Come: Two novellas''. New York: Braziller, 1981. * Child's Play / With Eustace / The prowler (novella & stories). London: Chatto & Windus, 1982; Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1983. * Antipodes: Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. * Untold Tales. Sydney: Paper Bark Press, 1999. * Dream Stuff: Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000; New York: Pantheon, 2000; Toronto: Knopf, 2000. * Every Move You Make. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006; Milsons Point, NSW: Chatto & Windus, 2007. * The Complete Stories. Sydney: Random House, 2007; New York: Pantheon, 2007. Non-fiction * 12 Edmondstone St.. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985; Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1986. * A Spirit of Play: The making of Australian consciousness. Sydney: ABC Books, 1998. * Made in England: Australia's British inhericance. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2003. * On Experience. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2008. * The Happy Life: The search for contentment in the modern world. Collingwood, Vic: Black Inc, 2011; London: Chatto & Windus, 2011; New York: Pantheon, 2011. *''A First Place''. North Sydney, NSW : Random House, 2014. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:David Malouf, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 29, 2014. Audio / video *''David Malouf / Martin Johnston'' (cassette). St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1975. *''Poems''. Glebe, NSW: Tall Poppies, 1996. Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat. See also * List of Australian poets References External links ;Poems *David Malour (Australia, 1934) at Poetry International (16 poems) * David Malouf (1934– ) in the Australian Poetry Library (424 poems). ;Audio / video *David Malouf at YouTube * VIDEO David Malouf talks about writing Ransom and the importance of story-telling on ABC FORA *[http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/book-show-david-malouf/clip1 Video clip of Malouf in interview from The book show (1988), SBS Television – 1'49"] *Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, on The Book Show on ABC Radio National, December 2007 ;About *David Malouf at Random House Australia *David Malouf at Australian Authors. *David Malout (Australia, 1934) on the Poetry International Web. *British Council on contemporary writers *AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource * Emily Bitto ' "Our Own Way Back": Spatial Memory in the poetry of David Malouf' JASAL 8 (2008) Category:1934 births Category:Living people Category:Australian poets Category:Australian short story writers Category:Australian novelists Category:Australian memoirists Category:Australian opera librettists Category:Australian people of Lebanese descent Category:People from Brisbane Category:Sephardi Jews Category:Australian expatriates Category:Arab writers Category:Australian Jews Category:LGBT Jews Category:LGBT writers from Australia Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:Jewish writers Category:Australian people of Portuguese descent Category:Writers from Queensland Category:University of Queensland alumni Category:Prix Femina Étranger winners Category:Gay writers Category:Living National Treasures of Australia Category:20th-century poets Category:21st-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:Jewish Australian writers Category:Jewish poets